Data Center Transitions

Data Center Transitions

Is there more to this project than simply what is seen on the surface?

What are your goals?

We are all under pressure to deliver more for less. Your upcoming transition is an opportunity to do just that. Do you have all of the information at your fingertips needed to make the right choices? What might be missing?

There are many types of transitions

A transition could entail migrating from an old storage subsystem to a new one, relocating to a new physical site, virtualizing physical servers to virtual, migrating to the cloud, converting from an old platform like zOS to x86, or converting from SAP to HANA or Oracle to UDB.

Will the transition result in the savings and other benefits you were promised at the start?

Sandpiper can help

Sandpiper has assisted hundreds of customers with extremely large site migrations across the globe, converted/migrated thousands of petabytes of storage, converted z/OS to x86, converted older Hyper-V to VMWare, Citrix or Xen, as well as many, many other types of transition projects, all with absolutely zero impact to the business. Give us a call or drop us an email to let us see how we can do the same for you.

Our Approach

Sandpiper works with you to ensure all business requirements are documented and used as input to the overall target IT eco-system & landscape design. IT exists only to support the business, so without a clear mapping of business needs to IT functionality costs tend to increase dramatically with no actual improvement in service.

Programmatic Workload & Infrastructure Discovery - VAiLPLEX

A critical component to the overall transition is to clearly understand workload & application inter-relationships and component dependencies. What servers talk to what other servers, workstations, IP cameras or external applications? How chatty is the workload? What time of day do you experience peak loads? What shared infrastructure components are in use that may affect another move group/bundle? Are the unknown workloads that would only increase the amount of network bandwidth needed to support the move & subsequent processing once the workload has been relocated?

Sandpiper has developed state-of-the-art workload, application and infrastructure discovery tools that run continuously and provide the history needed to allow accurate transition models to be developed and maintained. What new servers were added since the last move? How do those impact the next move?

This is not just a CMDB or DCIM tool. Sandpiper has worked from the ground up to develop a transition specific tool to measure and model workloads as part of a relocation/conversion project.

The Migration Factory - Ensuring the Launch

Once the above items have been collected and mapped to a target design, Sandpiper works to thoroughly test & validate the new infrastructure to ensure no surprises occur during the actual move. This testing phase is the second most important part of the project, with the actual move being successful as the most important.

All transition workflow & participants must be carefully choreographed & orchestrated in mock moves & isolated testing to ensure the move plan will be successful in the planned outage window (if any).